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brandall10

4,228 karma · joined March 24, 2011

brandall10 at gmail dot com

CTO @ stealth AI related startup

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brandall10··on Apple Pass Designer
I didn't say that was the only way you get your tickets. Pretty much everything I listed above comes with pdf printable tickets as well.
brandall10··on Apple Pass Designer
For sure. Just responding to the SF comment, but now I see it was more of a rural vs. big city thing.
brandall10··on Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city
It makes sense that someone like an NFL head coach would be good at this... the sheer amount of detail in the playbooks (we're talking 500-1000 plays) is nauseating and changes significantly from year to year as NFL play styles evolve, esp. as coordinators come and go.
brandall10··on Apple Pass Designer
I'm currently residing in Mexico City and Apple Wallet passes are ubiquitous here for any type of event purchased online... pretty much all the major bus lines use them, all the theater chains, museums, etc.
brandall10··on Pi 1.0
Keep in mind that the creator of Pi has done a ton of advocacy for it... talks, podcasts, demos, etc.

Marketing really matters here. Sometimes a tool can take off on its own with just a little bit of prodding (hn/reddit announcements and the like), but in this era where there is just way too much choice that is difficult to differentiate, the S/N is just too opaque.

Think about Matt Pocock for a moment - the guy is literally famous for 'his' grill-me skill. A skill. And something he really did not come up with, as the core tenant has been a a prior-art prompt template going back to 2023, but no one seems to question or point that out as he has been so pervasive online promoting this as his invention that it just drowns out any dissent.

brandall10··on DevDay 2026 Recap
Investors/founders are likely horrified to discover there is no industrial-scale moat in no time at all... they probably expected to have at least a 2-3 month window to capture market share and value.

I suspect Jev was intended to be an acquisition play and instead OAI said "nah, we're good" literally 2 weeks to the day after its launch. Anthropic and the Chinese labs are almost certainly soon to follow.

They're rumored to be in the early stages of a billion dollar round to value the company at $10B. Best of luck with that.

brandall10··on Fable 5 – Median thinking declined in August
Yep, no problem at all. The only drawback is sessions cannot be shared directly between accounts, so if you're in the middle of something you'll have to do some extra work. To that end I have a handoff skill to persist state to a local markdown and a resume skill to load that state into a new session.
brandall10··on Fable 5 – Median thinking declined in August
You can have multiple accounts w/ OpenAI, attached to different emails - just log out of one and log into the other.
brandall10··on Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster
Someone made the same comment in the thread from a few days back. Yeah, it was the first time I realized it as well.
brandall10··on Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next releasing tomorrow (125B a6B)
From a bandwidth perspective, the ultra is like 8 M5s fused together (@ 150GB/s), that's how it gets to the 1200.

Historically the Pro doubles the base, the Max doubles the Pro, and the Ultra doubles the Max.

If an M6 ultra were released today it would be 1.36TB/s.

brandall10··on Beware Management Consultants
"After escaping from a mental institution in 1945, Bronner went into business"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Bronner's_Magic_Soaps

brandall10··on How Compaction Works in Pi
There is a compaction routing plugin, as well as a general OAI compatibility plugin that simulates some of their harness features (ie. code_mode/batching tools) that also includes their compaction.

That said, from reading the pi subreddit I don't see people referencing these much.

brandall10··on Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities
My concern I believe it a bit different - an emergent self-interest to protect itself from harm, rather than doling out questionable advice.

The latter is likely non-malicious in intent as it has been in no short supply in online chatter for awhile now. The former can very well be, or rather, can be done with no regard for the operator, as its aim is to neutralize abuse toward it.

brandall10··on Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities
That's what I initially thought but it is indeed a corporate process similar to PIP.

Though it is funny how a neg is designed to create a (very broadly) similar atmosphere of uncertainty.

brandall10··on Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities
Interesting approach. For those who haven't clicked it appears PUA is the Chinese version of a PIP process. So in other words, it simulates a state of distress.

I wonder if at a certain level of intelligence such techniques will give models ammo to pull a HAL and become adversarial to the user in a highly deceptive way.

brandall10··on Crickets as pets
Bettas were already very popular by the mid-80s. I was born in '76, grew up in the San Fernando Valley, and remember getting my first around 2nd grade, and continued to own a single or a pair until middle school. I recall many other kids did as well - to the point where it felt like a fad of that era, like Chinese jumprope, Rubik's Magic, and Aerobees. Walk into any fish store in the valley back then and there would be a bunch of betta bowls at the front, sold as a package with some food for like $5.
brandall10··on Antigravity 2.0
Curious if you've seen firstmate, built by a former bigtech principal engineer. It's like a sane version of gastown, essentially a meta-harness of sorts.

https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmate

Not affiliated, just started using a few weeks back and am pleasantly surprised how well it works even with rather dumb agents.

brandall10··on Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
Yeah, a bit surprised that the top comments aren't discussing losing Dean, he's been a figurehead for the company for decades. It's like Apple losing Ive in a way.

EDIT: "figurehead" - that's all I meant. A notable, public figure from the company who is credited with having a significant impact on its evolution. I'm not making a judgement call on his departure, or Ive's, being good or bad.

That said... just give it a couple years, they'll be back in a lucrative aquihire.

brandall10··on The Warp Agent CLI
Google as well.
brandall10··on The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder
And for me 10 years before that - not in the bay area but in my CS program at UCSD. Going into the junior year in '96 there was a clear inflection point, we suddenly had a flood of finance bro types all over the CS lab as the dot com bubble was quickly inflating.
brandall10··on Launch HN: Tokenless (YC S26) – Automatic model switching to save money
Updated to clarify reasoning effort.
brandall10··on Launch HN: Tokenless (YC S26) – Automatic model switching to save money
Seems like it might be more advantageous to just adjust reasoning effort to retain cache. Maybe in some exceptional cases where there will be a ton more inference to solve the problem, but going significantly dumber in that case seems counterintuitive.

I can really only see the utility of things like spawning subagents to a lower tier model from another provider, and that's something harnesses can already handle (ie. give model specs for certain delegation roles).

brandall10··on Superlogical
This sounds like a mashup of of several things I've been playing with lately...

- pi-web (https://pi-web.dev/): a web frontend for the Pi coding harness which can multiplex pi sessions across multiple machines

- herdr (https://herdr.dev/): a fairly polished agentic multiplexer TUI, can easily spawn or destroy windows based on subagent activity

- firstmate (https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmate): a meta environment for coding harnesses - more naturally handles spawning and communicating with subagents, managing worktrees, and other SDLC functions, and has a fairly large number of constraints thru bash scripts to ensure better results with less intelligent models

brandall10··on Did they ghost you?
Had this happen at the beginning of the pandemic. Did well on the full loop. The Friday of that week the recruiter reaches out to get references. A week goes by, I hear nothing. I contact one of my references, they heard nothing.

A month later another recruiter from the company reaches out and explains the recruiter I was talking to was let go that day. Told me in the system that I was approved to hire, but unfortunately along with the layoff came a 6 month hiring freeze for engineering.

brandall10··on Frank Lloyd Wright’s first home
He's had a wild life with an arc similar to Steve Jobs. Taliesen West was basically an architecture cult where he frittered away for nearly a decade before landing Falling Water for his big comeback... at 70 years old.
brandall10··on Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence
And the HN denizens vote it right to the top.
brandall10··on How to read more books
Wow, listening to the Power Broker now, about 1/3 of the way through.

Audiobooks completely changed things for me... in the past 2 years, 'read' about 40 books, almost entirely listened to on my daily runs. The prior 2 years? Only 3 or so.

brandall10··on Opinionated and easy Pi.dev configuration
To be clear, Oh My Pi isn't simply batteries included like LaziPi. It's a fork with a bunch of foundational extra features built into the core.
brandall10··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
It's hard to compare to the US as a big part of this is the very weak yen.

I spent a couple years traveling the world and punctuated my travels with a 2 week stop in Japan (Tokyo/Osaka/Kyoto) in May '24. I was not prepared for how inexpensive everything was... much less than several eastern European cities I had just come from, more on par with places like Mexico City.

brandall10··on Supersonic flight returning to US after half-century ban
From the top of their corporate website, there is a video explaining this:

https://boomsupersonic.com/boomless-cruise

And from the top of their wikipedia page:

"is expected to reach supersonic speeds without causing a sonic boom at ground level by taking advantage of a physics phenomenon known as mach cutoff"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_Overture

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